The play was received with uproarious laughter all over the empire, but it is a singular comment upon the Russian character of the period to observe that, while it produced so great a furor that the Czar read it with tears of laughter and afterwards handsomely pensioned the author, it led to no official reforms.
A single specimen of its dry humor will illustrate. I quote from Turner’s “Studies in Russian Literature.”
The prefect is alarmed at the intelligence that his superior, the revising [inspecting] officer, may be expected on any day or at any hour, and begs the postmaster to open all the letters that may in the meantime pass through his office. That exemplary official informs him that such has always been his custom, “not from any state reason,” as he takes care to explain, “but from curiosity;” some of the letters he had opened being so entertaining that he really could not find the heart to send them on, but had kept them in his desk. When reminded by a cautious colleague that this is likely to get him into trouble with the public, the prefect cuts short the remonstration by crying out, “Oh, batoushka Gogol founded the realistic school in Russia when he produced his masterpiece “Dead Souls,” a work sufficiently powerful to raise him at once to the pinnacle of literary fame. The idea of the book consists of the ingenious plan of a certain Tchitchikoff, who had lost his place in consequence of his misdemeanors in the custom-house having been discovered. In order to retrieve his fortune he visits different landed proprietors and buys from them the names of all their serfs who have died since the last census. Having thus established an ownership, he succeeds in borrowing large sums of money by giving the names of the dead serfs as security, since these dead souls have been legally made over to him. Naturally, the bankers think that they are making the loan upon good live collateral. What becomes of Tchitchikoff, we do not know, for Gogol destroyed the manuscript of the last section of his work—some say, in a fit of abstraction; others, under the influence of religious enthusiasm. Upon this framework, the author has produced a series of remarkable descriptions—not pure realism, indeed, in our modern acceptation of the term, but rather akin to the realism of Dickens. Its truthful picture of Russian life, its repellent yet attractive qualities, its penetratingly keen analysis of character, caused Pushkin to exclaim when Gogol read him the first chapters of his book, “God, how miserable life is in Russia!” Rarely do power and delicacy unite in a stylist as they do in Gogol. For the one, we may find an origin in his love for the sun-steeped and snow-blown plains of his native Cossack country—a love which constantly manifested itself in a real nostalgia, yet never brought him back for long from his wanderings, especially in Italy. But for the other, that delicate power of evocation—that compound of Loti’s subtlety of nature-sense, Hoffmann’s light fantasy, and Daudet’s airy narrative manner, half-humorous, half-pathetic—for this we must look to some inborn faculty. In any other writer we might trace this gossamer lightness to much commerce with the thoughts of women. But no woman ever entered largely into Gogol’s life, and when he died, on March 4, 1852, being not yet forty-three years of age, his mother—always his mother—was still his only love. His last days were shadowed by a growing ineptitude. His frail body weakened by religious fastings, his resources scattered by prodigal gifts, his mind enfeebled and depressed—his passing was sad, lonely, and almost unnoticed. Gogol was the first great prose artist in Russian literature. In the tale and the sketch, in comedy, in romance, and in realism, he not only blazed new trails but penetrated so far into the unknown that others for a long time followed only at a distance. But follow they did, for, as one of his compatriot wits has observed, “We have all hidden under ‘The Cloak.’” The masterpiece of fantastic narration and character delineation which follows in translation was published, under the title “Shinel,” in 1839, when Gogol was thirty. It is overlong, according to our modern standards, yet not as a piece of artistic workmanship. Its humor, its suggestiveness, its pathos, its whimsicality, all rank it with the world’s great short fictions. By Nikolai GogolTHE CLOAK